Friday, December 4, 2015

Decoding Classic Maya Ceramics

Glyphs on Pots
Decoding Classic Maya Ceramics
Materials for presentations by David Stuart, Barbara Macleod, Yuriy
Polyukhovich, Stephen Houston, Simon Martin, and Dorie Reents-Budet
A section of the 2005 edition of the Sourcebook for the
29th Maya Meetings at Texas, The University of Texas at Austin
March 11-16, 2005
Glyphs on Pots:
Decoding Classic Maya Ceramics
Contents
I. Historical Background
by David Stuart
II. Selected Topics
by David Stuart
1. Tagging Objects
2. The Dedicatory Formula
3. The Dedicatory Formula on Vessels
4. Vessel Dedications as History
5. Vessel Typology and Terms
6. Vessels with Proper Names
7. Vessels as “Houses”
8. Overview of Drinks and Vessel Contents
9. Iximte’el kakaw
10. The Mythical Origin of Cacao
11. Rare Varieties of Cacao
12. Ul, atole (maize gruel)
13. What is tzih?
14. Where’s the pulque?
15.. Dedicatory Verbs
16. The Nagging –ich
17. Carved or Painted?
18. Vessel owners as Deified Impersonators
19. The Way Beings
III. Deciphering the Initial Sign
by Barbara Macleod and Yuriiy Polyukhovich
IV. Metamorphosis in the Underworld: The Maize God and the Mythology
of Cacao
by Simon Martin
Part I. Historical Background
David Stuart
The study of glyphs on Maya pottery more or less parallels the advances in Maya
decipherment over the past two decades. In fact, one could easily make the case that the
rapid progress in the decipherment in the 1980’s and early 90’s was driven by the
detailed analysis of repetitious and highly formulaic pottery texts. When the same words
are written by hundreds of scribes over several centuries, the variations and substitution
patterns are bound to reveal the basic workings of the script. The patterns that led to the
“code breaking,” as it were, were relatively easy to spot within such a well-defined and
restricted environment.
Of course, the seminal work in the structural analysis of pottery texts goes back to
Micheal Coe’s The Maya Scribe and His World (1973) wherein he identified of the socalled
“Primary Standard Sequence” (what many simply call the “PSS”). Mike was not
able to read the PSS inscriptions at that time, but he set the stage for all later structural
and phonetic analyses. He simply noted that Maya pottery often bore the same glyphs
over and over again, and in a fairly rigid order of appearances. Some were long and
some were short, but all of the inscriptions followed a standard and discernable
arrangement. Mike continued to study the PSS through more and more examples that he
published in several other catalogs of Maya pottery – all considered classics in Maya art
and archaeology. Throughout this time, in the 1970s and early 80s, the stimulus for the
study of art and writing on Maya ceramics was Justin Kerr, who was steadily compiling
his now famous photographic archive (see www.mayavase.com). Together, Mike and
Justin laid the foundation for all work on Maya pottery, and it should become clear to all
that this in turn had profound effects on Maya decipherment and iconographic
interpretation in general.
Another key publication in this time was The Maya Book of the Dead, by Francis
Robicsek and Donald Hales. The interpretations within have not necessarily stood the
test of time, but again it was the countless images by Justin and others that gave
epigraphers and iconographers the raw material for making advances. I well remember
Linda Schele, Peter Mathews and I sitting on a couch in San Cristobal de las Casas in
1981, pouring our eyes over every page and coming up with several exciting
observations. By the mid-80s, enough examples of the formulaic texts on pottery had
been compiled to make important strides in decipherment.
The story of deciphering glyphs on pots begins a few years earlier, with Peter
Mathews’ seminal discovery of a hieroglyphic nametag on a jade earspool from Altun
Ha, Belize. He noticed one phonetically transparent glyph u-tu-pa, which he read as utuup,
“her earspool.” John Justeson soon noticed precisely the same term on jades from
Chichen Itzá, and in 1982, I noticed that many of the bones from Burial 116 at Tikal